


Forging the Swordmaker

by AoifeMoran



Series: The Swordmaker [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Bisexual Female Character, Canon Character of Color, F/F, F/M, MCU References, Mako-centric, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2013-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-04 18:22:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AoifeMoran/pseuds/AoifeMoran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dangerous women don't appear out of nowhere. This is the story of how Mako Mori became the Swordmaker. A prequel of sorts to "Rules of the Shatterdome."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forging the Swordmaker

**Author's Note:**

> As written in the summary, this is a prequel, sort of, to Rules of the Shatterdome. I didn't expect to write this, but evidently, the universe had other ideas.  
> This piece provides more background to the AU details of RotS, while focusing mostly on Mako growing up on base, in that slightly twisted world.
> 
> Most of this was written at an ungodly hour of the morning, hopped up on caffeine and listening to M.I.A.'s "Bad Girls." I am convinced that it is Mako's theme song, in this AU.
> 
> Finally, I'd like to thank everyone who's read and left comments and kudos on my other stories. Your positive responses have convinced me to post more of the things I've written.

When Mako is 10 and the Kaiju ships are still coming out of the Pacific only one or two times a year, she has the bad luck to be in Tokyo with her parents when a Kaiju carrier surfaces by the Japanese islands.

The city is evacuated, but she gets separated from her parents, chasing after her brand new red shoe. Later, she learns they didn't even make it out alive, but for now, she is missing a shoe and hiding behind a dumpster, and she can hear the squelching steps of the alien troops approaching, as though they can smell where she is.

Everything the aliens touch starts to crumble - their very presence is corrosive, poisonous - and she can see the edges of the building she leans against begin to turn into dust. She mustn't scream, she knows, and she couldn't if she tried. Her screams lodge in her throat as one alien breaks off from the group and heads towards her. Mako's heart beats impossibly fast. She is going to die, she knows. Eyes screwed shut, she awaits the inevitable.

The inevitable fails to happen. She opens one eye. She sees a man-shaped metal suit, surrounded in the golden glow of the setting sun, pulling a large tactical knife out of the foul-smelling remains of the Kaiju that had been approaching her.

When she grows up, Mako promises herself then, she will save people like this person has just saved her. First, though, she will work on growing up - whoever this person is, they are awfully tall, after all, and Mako has always been short for her age.

The suit's faceplate lifts, and she sees that its occupant is a tired-looking man. He man extends a hand to her, helping her off the ground, and she stands around uncertainly. "I don't know where my parents are," she tells him, and then mentally berates herself, belatedly realizing it is unlikely that he speaks Japanese. Mako starts to repeat herself in halting English, but he interrupts. She is surprised when he responds in Japanese, however accented, but his tone is kind as he tells her that he and his men will escort her and any other survivors they find to the nearest evacuation center, as soon as they are certain no more Kaiju remain.

\---

She doesn't expect to ever see her savior after that terrible day, after discovering her parents are dead and half of Tokyo has been reduced to rubble. Three years later, when he shows up at the international orphanage she's been placed in, for the "Displaced Children of the Kaiju Wars," Mako is as surprised as anyone. When he asks if she will allow him to adopt her, even if it means a life on the road, with the PPDC, she is even more surprised.

She says yes to his offer, on one condition: as soon as she is old enough, he must allow her to attend the PPDC's training academy. Marshall Pentecost tries to argue, but Mako is adamant. One day, she will save someone like he saved her. She must have the proper tools to do it.

\---

Living with the Marshall, Mako meets the most interesting people.

There is Tamsin, who had been in command in Tokyo on that disastrous day, until a seizure took her permanently out of action. She looks pale and fragile, surrounded by the constant hum of strange machines in the medical bay of the Hawaiian base they are staying at. Her voice is a ragged whisper, but Mako can still hear the passion and fire that must once have made this woman a formidable commander.

Mako learns that behind her adoption was Tamsin's subtle hand convincing Stacker that he needed a family, someone to watch out for him when Tamsin is no longer there to do it, and Mako's respect and admiration for this impressive woman grows. From Tamsin's example, she learns that there is no use hiding from the obvious and the inevitable, and no matter how hard it may be, it must be faced head on. From Tamsin, she learns that power isn't only wearing an expensive suit with high ranks pinned to it. Power is also knowing how to shape events to create desirable outcomes, manipulating from the sidelines.

Mako takes all of Tamsin's lessons to heart.

After Tamsin's death, they move to Kodiak Island, Alaska, where her adoptive father takes charge of the PPDC's academy. There, Mako meets Sasha Kaidanovsky, who is already something of a legend even though she hasn't even graduated yet.

Sasha is a former prison guard, and there is something about her that terrifies and excites Mako. Their friendship is unexpected, as Sasha is more than ten years Mako's senior and has a boyfriend who is, like her, a PPDC cadet. Still, nobody is about to remind them of that, especially once it becomes clear that Mako's adoptive father has no objections.

He walks in on Sasha bleaching the tips of Mako's hair, once, and walks out, giving his tacit approval to the two. Mako, whose stomach contorts oddly when Sasha's calloused hands so much as brush her face accidentally, is glad her adoptive father has no problems with this friendship. Over time, Mako's crush on Sasha fades, and Sasha becomes the older sister Mako never had. Sasha teaches her how to apply red lipstick to guarantee an instantly fierce appearance, and walk in heels. She teaches Mako how to wrap boys around her little finger and get them to do anything she wants.

From Sasha, Mako learns that presentation matters. She learns how to act like she knows what she's doing even when she doesn't, and how to carry herself with so much authority that people mistake her for being older and taller than she is.

Sasha leaves, but there are plenty more trainees and personnel for Mako to pass time her with as the years pass.

Tendo Choi and the researchers teach Mako the value of technical knowledge, of understanding what is going on around her even if it might not be necessary. They encourage her curiosity, and for a while, Mako finds herself getting into as much trouble as the Becket brothers, who are attaining the same degree of legend as Sasha and Aleksis, though for utterly different reasons.

Waiting for yet another stern talking-to from the Marshall, for again sticking her nose where it shouldn't be, Mako can't help but overhear the Becket boys get chastised for their irresponsible behaviour. They emerge with properly ashamed looks on their puckish faces, and if she didn't think boys were utterly stupid, Mako might have found them attractive.

Chuck Hansen, however, has ruined boys for her. He is cocky, loud, and Australian, and makes fun of her accent and her hair and anything else he can think of, and his only redeeming quality is his dog Max. Mako sees him several times a year, now that she lives with the Marshall, since Chuck's father is a close friend of his, and a high-ranking officer of the PPDC.

One of Herc's jobs is to find replacements for officers killed in action, drawing from the pool of recent and upcoming graduates. As the frequency of Kaiju attacks increases, so does the frequency of the Hansens' visits to the academy. Consequently, the amount of time Mako spends with Chuck increases too.

He is one year younger than her, but he makes up for the age gap by sheer obnoxiousness, and an impossible tan. She envies him the fact that his father is stationed in warmer climes, though she'll never tell him that. Mako will also never tell him that, especially as they get older, she finds him more and more attractive. Part of what makes him so attractive is his relentless drive to get better, to join the PPDC and avenge his mother's death by killing as many Kaiju as he can. The rest should be obvious to anyone who's caught Chuck parading around shirtless.

Like many other sights around the academy, it is not one to be missed.

Mako misses nothing when, at eighteen, she is finally allowed to enter it.

\---

When she graduates, Mako expects to be given a combat command, like Sasha and the Beckets. Instead, Pentecost arranges for her to be given a position heading the project restoring outdated weaponry from the early years of the Kaiju Wars. The attacks come with more frequency, now, and the death tolls grow ever higher as the enemy starts to adapt to the PPDC's strategies.

They lose Yancy Becket to the Kaiju, who crush him in his armor like a tin can, and Raleigh Becket to his memories, which wake him screaming at night and leave him unable to step on a battlefield without seeing his brother's ghost. Chuck's uncle Scott is killed in action, and she doesn't know the details, but she grieves Herc's second-in-command all the same. Mako wishes they were the only people she's known out of the ones they have lost.

They aren't.

She tries not to be resentful of Stacker for the position he's given her, especially in the wake of these deaths. Her work is important, after all, and she is helping to develop new versions of the suits the PPDC's trained pilots wear.

A new Marvel film had come out the year the first Kaiju ship made landfall, and Iron Man was still on people's minds when humanity needed to find better ways to fight the invaders. After all the other proposals had been shot down, this one remained: why not outfit a select few soldiers in nuclear-powered armor, like the comic hero, so they could fight the Kaiju better?

Officially called Defensive Reaction to Insurgency: Vehicular Exoskeleton suits, their pilots call them Jägers, from the German word for hunter, since they use them to hunt monsters. The Jägers are humanity's best weapon against the Kaiju. Under Mako's direction, they become even better: their lightweight titanium-gold alloys are replaced with even lighter ceramic plates, increasing speed and durability. She equips the suits with all the weaponry they can hold: ceramic swords, percussion grenades, Tesla-coil charged gauntlets. Most of the more recent suits are digital, but Mako still makes sure the older suits' reactors are properly shielded. No one is going to get cancer from prolonged exposure, like Tamsin did, under Mako's watch. Mako will not suffer another death like Yancy's to happen, if she can help it.

Still, she wishes she could be out on the front lines. Out there, Mako thinks, she could really make a difference.

She will not, however, go behind Stacker Pentecost's back to get a combat assignment. "It's not about weakness," she hisses to Chuck Hansen, fresh out of the academy, when he tells her she's too weak to get what she wants. "It's about _respect_." It's about honoring her debt to Pentecost, and remembering that he saved her life. For that, she will be content to stay behind the front lines.

\---

The Kaiju start coming faster, more often, and the PPDC doesn't start losing, but the cost of winning becomes higher. Pentecost's academy loses funding in favor of the large sea-walls now touted as the best option. Everyone around the him knows the walls aren't going to accomplish anything. All they do is isolate nations from each other.

The PPDC gains power from this isolation, becoming the sole distrubutor of information concerning the Kaiju Wars, the only organization capable of assisting nations after Kaiju-induced destruction. Privately, Mako begins to think that it has stopped being a benevolent, multi-national cooperative, and is becoming a threatening, hegemonical power. She is not the only one to think so.

Stacker sends her to find safer harbors for the remaining Jägers and their pilots. Mako quietly makes her way around the world, observing.

In Lima, the streets are crowded with refugees, and the fault line the city rests on makes the chaos worse. Each Kaiju ship in the Pacific brings yet another earthquake to the city. Tokyo has rebuilt in the years since the landing that killed her parents, but Mako doesn't think she can stand to see it destroyed another time. She tells Pentecost there is no suitable real-estate available for the base he wants to establish. He sees easily through her lies. Mako considers Manila, Vancouver, Seattle, Okha, and a host of other cities by the Pacific, until whispers from Hong Kong reach her. She hears about a temple built from Kaiju skulls, and a one-eyed man who is harvesting their corpses for anything worth selling.

When she meets Hannibal Chau in a dirty room full of pickled Kaiju bits, Mako tastes possibility.

He offers Mako a bargain: Stacker Pentecost and all the personnel and equipment he can steal and get to Hong Kong will have the space they need, provided by Chau and his people. In exchange, Chau gets a monopoly on Kaiju corpses, and their assistance fighting the PPDC when the Kaiju threat is gone.

\---

On the day before the Jäger Academy's entire staff and contents, and every living Jäger pilot disappeared, all of them branded outlaws and criminals, Mako Mori stepped onto a helicopter.

Hours later, in Hong Kong, the Swordmaker stepped off.

She had work to do.


End file.
